Joe Rogan is officially freaked out about the coronavirus.
On the most recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan expressed his anxiety over the spreading virus. A clip from the episode, which aired on Wednesday, shows Rogan and his guest, Justin Martindale, anxiously conversing about the outbreak.
The discussion began when Rogan brought up a video that’s recently been making waves online. Shared by People’s Daily, the largest newspaper group in China, the video shows Chinese officials working to combat the spread of the virus. The video begins with trucks, cruising down the highway and spewing a white mist into the air. As the video continues, it shifts to show people with objects that look somewhat like leaf blowers, spouting plumes of a similar white fog all over the city.
According to the video’s title, it depicts the “full-front disinfection” of Wuhan. According to the New York Times, the video showed “mist cannons and water sprinkler trucks” attempting to clean Wuhan’s streets. The effort is intended to stall the spread of the outbreak, which has claimed 1,367 lives so far, per Al Jazeera. So far, “21,130 liters of disinfectant and 720 liters of toilet cleaning products” have been used across Wuhan, according to the Times.
“I think it could help to reduce environmental contamination with coronavirus, but we have not yet seen evidence that coronavirus has been spreading through the environment,” Professor Benjamin Cowling, from the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong, told the Times. “Our current understanding is that most transmission occurs via prolonged close contact with infected persons.”
The videos, along with continued reports of infected in the United States and beyond, have Rogan spooked. He discussed the outbreak in detail, noting the strange properties that have made it difficult for officials to manage. “This coronavirus they say can live outside of a host for three days,” he said. “So if you have, like, coronavirus on your hand, you touch a railing, that shit will exist outside of your body for three days. Which is very unusual.”
Rogan also compared the coronavirus to the Spanish Flu, which killed between 20 and 50 million people between 1918 and 1919.
“It scares me man. These things absolutely can wipe out millions and millions of people before they can get a handle on it.”
According to the Atlantic, his podcast was iTunes’ No. 2 most-downloaded series in 2018 and 2019.
